Apple catches flak in China supply chain saga

roundup The maker of iPads and iPhones is hardly alone among tech companies that rely heavily on Chinese factories under scrutiny for labor practices. But it's become the flashpoint.

Apple's bittersweet week

week in review Apple reports record earnings but grapples with worker condition criticism. Also, the Supreme Court strikes down warrantless GPS tracking and RIM gets a new CEO.

Apple-Foxconn tale goes well beyond Apple, and tech

Apple is under fire for its supply chain labor, but every tech item--indeed, everything you own--goes through the same manufacturing paces.

Google Earth 6.2 seamlessly stitches over mismatched patchwork

Unsightly mosaic artifacts no longer mar Google Earth's high-altitude views. But for an even more singular look at the planet, check Flickr's latest NASA contribution.

Next Xbox to prevent you from playing used games?

Microsoft might add used-game restrictions on its next Xbox, according to Kotaku--though it's not clear how such a technology would be set up.

Yahoo looks for ways to shed Japanese namesake

The company is reportedly trying to get the deal done without being forced to pay as much as $4 billion in taxes.

Chrome lets Web pages use smarter autofill technology

Web developers can explicitly label fields with the type of data they're expecting to cut down on autofill errors. Google wants to standardize it as part of HTML5.

Intel pays $120M for RealNetworks video patents, software

Intel buys more video clout with "foundational" patents and next-generation encoding software. Video is spreading to every sort of gadget, and it's a market with abundant patent challenges.

Nintendo's huge losses continue; when will the bleeding stop?

The game company loses nearly $625 million during the nine months ended December 31. Looking ahead, its forecast has been revised down with deeper losses.

Web sites are getting faster--but not enough

The top 2,000 retail Web sites load faster this year but still take 10 seconds on average, a study says. Also: IE9 beats Chrome and Firefox in the speed race.

Obama at Intel: America, make more stuff

The president makes a case for bringing more manufacturing jobs home to the U.S. when he spoke at Intel's Chandler, Ariz., manufacturing facility.

Qualcomm acquires smartphone, tablet display startup

Qualcomm acquires a display tech company that may help it advance its development of mirasol displays for smartphones and tablets.

The end of the server-versus-storage wars is nigh

One way to more closely couple servers and storage is to use a storage device's native processing power to run applications. That's right--we should soon see a storage device that runs applications.

Open WebOS committed to fall 2012

Hewlett-Packard unveils a timeline for when the struggling WebOS will be fully open source. But will anybody care?

Hotmail hops onto Kindle Fire

After the recent release of its Hotmail app for the Android Market, Microsoft has followed up with a specific version of its popular e-mail service for Amazon's Kindle Fire.

27,000 Google Chromebooks headed to U.S. schools

Google has found allies in three school districts that will bring the browser-based laptops to thousands of students. At least some of those kids not-so-secretly covet tablets, though.

Apple shares soar following historic earnings announcement

The stock is on the upswing this morning, pushing the market cap to the range of $415 billion and returning Apple to the status of the world's most valuable public company.

SquareTrade snags $238 million growth equity investment

The service, which sells warranties for consumer electronics and appliances, plans to use proceeds to fund company growth.

Kwaga sifts address-book info from Outlook, too

The WriteThat.name plug-in transfers contact info from e-mail signatures to the Outlook address book.

Every moment counts in Mozilla's bid for mobile relevance

An overhauled version of Firefox for Android could come shortly after January 31--or maybe six weeks later, a stretch in which Apple might sell 26 million iPhones and iPads.